Live data from Hacker News

Folding@home takes up the fight against COVID-19

foldingathome.org

1–10 of 109 posts

Re: Folding@home takes up the fight against COVID-19

#6

Has FAH approach solved any other real world problems? Has its findings accelerated understanding of any particular disease or helped significantly in developing a cure?

Have you checked the website? E.g. https://foldingathome.org/papers-results/

Re: Folding@home takes up the fight against COVID-19

#8

Has FAH approach solved any other real world problems? Has its findings accelerated understanding of any particular disease or helped significantly in developing a cure?

Their wiki page lists a handful of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding%40home#Examples_of_app...

Do keep in mind that 1. very few drug candidates make it through drug trials (iirc it's something around 1 in 1000), and 2. these trials takes 10+ years, and FAH has been around for only 19 years. It's very likely that a bunch of its results are in trial right now, and we'd only hear about it 10-20 years in the future

Re: Folding@home takes up the fight against COVID-19

#9
Saw that on Heise (German IT magazine) a few days ago. Setup on Arch Linux is really simple (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Folding@home), but with our electricity costs over here it's more expensive than what I'm willing to contribute - my CPU compute node [2*2687W] at home draws 500W on FAH, which translates to 112US$ per month (80W idle, but it's mostly powered down anyway). Else this & BOINC would be a really nice way to utilize my unused hardware.

Re: Folding@home takes up the fight against COVID-19

#10
post #3

Maybe they should reconsider the integration with BOINC. That would give them access to one of the largest distributed clusters.

I can see they have staff shortages that prohibits that: https://foldingathome.org/faqs/high-performance/fah-on-boinc...
Post reply on HN